A journal about the things we do for love - leaving the comforts of home and going to live in a remote tropical island.

Saturday, May 22, 2010

Denarau - hotel, food, port and massages!

We are staying at the Radisson which is a lovely resort. The pool probably isn’t as good as some of the other resorts, and the bars are a bit more of a weirder style – but we have some drinks in our room so we don’t really need to go hang out in the bars!! Other than the pool bar in the afternoons as they have 2 for 1 priced drinks between 5-6pm which is great! The room is nice and I love that someone comes to make our bed every day!!

We have eaten at the buffet (it’s called ‘Easy on the Wallet’!!) which has an assortment of average food. We also ate at the Asian restaurant which was really lovely –and if you come here I recommend the lemon chicken. It’s not like we know it in Australia! It’s beautiful delicately tempura fried pieces of chicken with a side sauce of lemon and side of almond flakes for dipping! Really delicious. And the sushi is lovely too!!

We had a fancy dinner to celebrate our 2 year anniversary (which was actually in March, but we missed it due to the distance!!). We ate at the Cross, which is a place which MasterChef wouldn’t be able to fault!! Designer food if ever I’ve seen it, but really was delicious. There were pyramids made out of bread sticks, parmesan cheese rolls (like a big bracelet!) and sorbet to cleanse the palette and cold towels to freshen up between courses!! 3 course meal for about $60AUD isn’t bad at all!

We have walked down to the port a couple of times - there are heaps of restaurants and cafe style places down there –all cheaper than at the hotels! When the ships come in (the big cruise liners) there are people everywhere!! But if you can go on a day when there are no ships in sights it’s actually quite a pretty little port for meandering around!! We had lunch at the Hard Rock Cafe – where the staff every so often stop work and stand up to do a little dance routine! Hilarious!

We have booked a massage for tomorrow –in a little massage place which has reasonably priced massages!! The hotels all charge a huge amount for a massage – about $140-$180FJD each! We actually found a place in Nadi Town when we were there – it charged $30FJD an hour! What an experience – although I’m not sure in a hugely positive way! It was in a rundown little house which had rooms with curtains, but limited fans! We were put in a double room so we could be together. The beds they used had the cut-out for the heads but no padding – with all the pushing and pulling with the massage I ended up with the sorest spot on my head –feeling like it’s all bruised!! I asked for a medium massage and Sefo asked for a hard one – it didn’t take long for him to downgrade to medium and I kept having to say it was too hard to me! The lady had elbows in various places, fingers pressed right into muscles and found every sore spot I had and really worked them out (although I’m not sure she realised they were sore spots – unless she heard me crying!)! It was so painful! Not the nice relaxing massage I envisaged! But at least I thought that I would feel better afterwards! I felt like I had been hit by a bus! So sore!! So the point of this story is to link it back to the port and to explain why we wanted a bit more of a fancy massage and not so much of a cheap one! We found a happy medium (I hope!) with the massage place at the port – reasonable prices in a nice smelling, air conditioned room! I’ll let you know how it goes!!